Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
AI
[Samantha Cole at 404 Media] "A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films." 404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet itself, which seems to be
Technology
[Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge] "Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast. “Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re
Notable links
[Anthony Robledo at USA Today] "Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was tricked into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures." The thing is, his daughter Vivian is perfectly happy with the decision. The
Technology
[Christine Hall at FOSS Force] "The Apache Software Foundation is making changes in an attempt to right a wrong it unintentionally created when it adopted its name 25-years ago." This is an unnecessarily awkward article (why describe the existing logo as cool in this context?!) to describe a
Technology
[Kayleigh Barber and Seb Joseph at Digiday] "After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Turns out all the fuss over the years wasn’t in vain after all; the ad industry’s cries have finally been heard." Advertisers are
AI
[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture] "ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two." The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an
Notable links
[Matt Stoller] "So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing
Technology
[Om Malik] "Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy." This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more
Media
[Richard J. Tofel] "I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of
Technology
[Robin Berjon] This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call: "If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function
Technology
[Plausible Analytics] "We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot
Climate
[Helene Smith at The Guardian] "Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already